Gravity |
  • UK / USA • 2013 • 91m •   • Directed by: Alfonso Cuarón. • Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris, Orto Ignatiussen, Phaldut Sharma, Amy Warren, Basher Savage, Adam Cozens. • Music by: Steven Price.      Dr. Ryan Stone is a brilliant medical engineer on her first shuttle mission with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky. But on a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes. The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Stone and Kowalsky completely alone - tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the blackness...
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So the two are on their way to the space station while Matt proceeds to ask Ryan questions about herself even though she only has 2% of her oxygen left. It's not logical. Why didn't he ask these questions sometime during the past week? This is the only time we get any character development in the film. The most important thing we learn about Ryan is that her daughter died from hitting her head at school, and since Ryan was driving in a car when she heard about it, she's been driving ever since.
Ryan and Matt reach the station and try to grab hold of anything while Ryan yells, "what do I do?" like she has no experience instead of doing what Matt instructed her to. Ryan has her foot caught on a thin rope that isn't able to sustain both of them, so Matt sacrifices himself for Ryan. This is probably the best moment of the film in terms of execution, as the dramatic music elevates the intensity of the moment. It's just a shame that I never cared about Clooney's character, and had he been developed more, this scene really could've been emotionally impactful.
Matt's still able to talk to her, and it's revealed that Ryan crashed the flight simulator each time during her training at NASA. Why would they allow her to partake in this mission if she's that incompetent? How was she allowed to pass if she failed a flight test numerous times?
Ryan enters the station and there's the deep "rebirth" metaphor as she goes into a fetal position while some ropes behind her symbolize umbilical cords. The idea of "rebirth" suggests that the character undergoes an immense change and I didn't see that here. We learn about Ryan's daughter dying but the subject is never explored, and her character didn't change to me. She doesn't become more capable or experienced in terms of finding a way of getting back to Earth, and she certainly doesn't seem to encompass a new life perspective. If the narrative had delved into more depth about how much her daughter's death affected her and then displayed her differently, this could've really worked well. I feel as though the daughter shouldn't have died or that it should've been reworked somehow, because then Ryan would have a real reason to return to Earth besides just her basic survival instincts. Ultimately, the entire metaphor fell flat and was unconvincing to me.
Ryan tells everything she's doing to the audience rather than showing it, hence it breaks the traditional principle of showing rather than telling. In the film All is Lost, the protagonist says nothing and the writer trusts the audience to figure it out. The approach used here is lazier by comparison.
The dumbest part of the film then unfolds. George Clooney enters the lifeboat. His light-hearted charm diminishes the emotion that the previous scene had built up as he slugs some Vodka. He says some motivational sentences to Ryan that can be summarized by saying, "get back to Earth," which is what Ryan's been trying to do all along. He doesn't provide any new insight. It turns out that the whole scene was a hallucinationdream sequence. So, not only does this scene not add anything the story, and not only does it act against the mood of the previous scene, but also undermines his dramatic send-off by bringing him back in ghost form for no useful purpose. But hell, given all the nonsense that's already happened, it wouldn't have surprised me at all if he actually had survived somehow and made it into this lifeboat. Ryan talks about her daughter for a little while to dead George Clooney in her mind, and this is emotional, but doesn't build up as much as it should due to the previous scene. I think it would've worked better if that scene had been cut entirely.
Ryan enters another abandoned space station and goes into another shuttle, where she presses buttons at random because she's incapable of properly operating it. Her guesswork must've paid off as the shuttle descends quickly into Earth's atmosphere and finally plunges into a lake in what appears to be the middle of some random jungle in South America. Luckily for Ryan, this spacecraft is somehow able to establish contact with Houston and they inform her that they're issuing a rescue mission for her.
Review by NBAmaster23 from the Internet Movie Database.
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